Search

My Other Blog

My NYT Bestseller!

What's a Wreck?

A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.

The best man at Julian and Janny's wedding decided that he wanted to surprise them with a cake. It was supposed to have "congratulations" written on it in both English and Thai since the bride was from Thailand.

Unfortunately, however, somewhere along the line someone's computer (probably a pc*) didn't recognize the Thai font (surprise, surprise), and so changed the font to...

waaait for it...

You guessed it! Gibberish!

(Or more precisely, gibberish that means nothing to anyone other that a few computer programmers who will no doubt point out my immense stupidity and poor lineage in the comment section.)

What gets me is that not only did the guy who printed it out not notice, but the hugely talented decorator didn't question it, either! For some reason I'm picturing a perfectly groomed English guy in a starched jacket and cummerbund saying, "Hm, yes, well. This is a tad awkward. But tally ho! Onward! What what! Good night, Westley! Good work! Sleep well! I'll most likely kill you in the morning!"

Wait, no. That's the Dread Pirate Roberts. Anyway.

Thanks to Julian and Janny

*Actually, it was a Commodore 64

Update: Apparently the font is not gibberish. It's called Mojibake or "an unintelligible sequence of characters." So, ya know. Gibberish. Only not gibberish. Everybody clear? Good good...

First of all, most modern PCs have foreign font packs installed (I'm talking Windows 7 here). Second of all that isn't Wingdings. They're just the closest ASCII representation of Thai characters. I enjoy Cakewrecks as much as the next person but don't go around bashing things because out of plain ignorance or you will lose a reader.

Gotta say, I think this is more of the cake orderers error than the cake maker. If that's what he/she/they signed off on, then I think the decorator actually did a great job! And by the way, that's Klingon, not wingdings...

Umm. Whoops. Apparently we found a NEW and GLORIOUS thing that is wrong with our format. I don't know what happened but I'm blaming Google.

Second...

Julian, the submitter, told me that the font was Wingdings and so I went with it. I have now changed it to gibberish which I don't believe is a font and I'm sure is still wrong.

Finally...

Avenphire,

Please accept my deepest apologies that I offended you so terribly with my lack of knowledge and my blatant disregard for the true nature of the font in question. My Father was a hamster and my mother smelled of elderberries.

I think what happened is the customer sent the email in ISO-8859-11 (Thai) encoding and the bakery's software read it as ISO-8859-1 (Western). Working backwards, that would give ขอให้โใชคดี. Although Google doesn't quite know how to translate that, so I might have messed up my math. Or the baker misspelled the nonsense.

"As...you...wiiiiissssshhhh" hehehehehe. I want to know who comes up with these fonts and then find someone besides a computer programmer who can read them. I kind of think that the people printing and writing out the font, have never seen the Thai language so they just assumed that it was like hieroglyphics or something.

First off, if you start a sentence with "hate to be a stickler" or "not to nitpick" --you are lying. You are a wing ding. The end. Jen- Your parenthetical statement made me laugh the hardest. I don't ever comment, so I didn't realize that people "reluctantly" (or happily, I guess) point out mistakes most of us don't care about.Not to be bossy, but enjoy the cakes or step off, people! John- I like the smell of elderberries. But the hamster? Inconceivable!

Come on... when you are doing something for a major event, such as a WEDDING, would it kill ya to double-check things?! I would never put something of another language onto a cake unless I have checked from several sources that it says the very same thing! LOL... not to mention the fact that anyone with common sense should have seen that the "Thai" writing looked more like alien writing from a sci-fi movie! '

If I start a sentence with "Not to be bossy" -- I am lying because I DO mean to be bossy when I say c'mon, settle down and have fun! Save yer outrage for sites that aren't nearly as clever, witty, and just plain awesome as this one.

*cough* The character in The Princess Bride is actually Westley, not Wesley. *tsk, tsk*I thought for sure such great Princess Bride fans would know that.

...or maybe it is a sore spot with me since my son's name is Wesley and I am always having people ask me in all seriousness if I named him after "Wesley in the Princess Bride". ;)

Other than that, the scripting is very pretty and the sentiment is lovely. It sure would have been nice, however, if the baker had verified what it should have said. It seems like anyone that has tried to type up half of a term paper at home, then the other half at school would be very familiar with that gibberish.

....but if the decorator had thought of that we wouldn't be having this laugh. :)

I'd just like to note that whoever actually wrote that on the cake did a decent job of making all the random symbols legible - some of them can be hard to tell apart, but because they did a decent job of it, it was easier to figure out what all the characters were, which made it easier to run it backwards through the scrambler.

Holy guacamole! When I went to look wistfully at yesterday's post to fortify myself until Sunday Sweets, what a delightful surprise! A Saturday post! (The whole thing, nothing cut off.) And even better, hilarious replies to the comments about John's "immense stupidity and poor lineage" - bonus! John, you really know this crowd to anticipate those comments. Yay for CW!